It appears to me that the Agile Community is falling behind the innovation curve. At conferences, user groups, mailing list, etc, we see the same old same old stuff (may be I’m missing something). So where is the real innovation happening? What space should I be watching?

These were the questions I posed to the group @ the SDTConf 2009. Later, during our discussion at the conference we tried answering them. After a wonderful discussion we come up with some suggestions:

This entry was posted
on Sunday, October 18th, 2009 at 2:39 PM and is filed under Agile, Community, Conference, Tips.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

http://blog.adsdevshop.com Robert Dempsey

Hi Naresh,

It seems to me that Agile is still in the selling phase. More companies are talking about their applications of agile and the benefits gained, and more companies are coming online. The same thing happened in the Ruby on Rails world. At first it was tons of marketing, and now, a number of years later, Rails is a known commodity and the community is doing truly innovative work.

I was reading a post the other day about a guy who was packaging up a “standard” agile implementation for companies to adopt. While we know that a hybrid approach (scrum + xp + whatever) is a typical result once business environment and culture are taken into account, the point was that businesses need a starting point, and it's easier to sell a package rather than an amorphous service.

I do believe that there is innovation occuring in the Agile community, we just don't really hear about it as much. Here's why.

When I was at the Agile Development Practices Conference in 2008 here in Orlando I heard speakers deriding audience members for not doing “pure Agile.” What a load of crap I thought. The same thing happened in the Rails world where people would deride newbies for not knowing everything already. We got told by Chad Fowler to stop being a bunch of assholes, and we did. Adoption of Rails has since increased greatly and the community is fantastic.

I think the same thing needs to happen in Agile. People need to stop taking a purist approach and show everyone how hybrid approaches can work extremely well. Then we'll see how far the innovation has come.Thanks for having a great blog. I've been following for quite some time, and am now happy to join in .

gustin

> People need to stop taking a purist approach and show everyone how hybrid approaches can work extremely well.

Great Point.

How is an Agilist a “Purist” anyway?

By definition agile should change, bend and morph to adapt to any enterprise or environment.

As long as the core principles and values are adhered to, an agile process will need to change to some degree for the specific environment, organization and scenario.

A tough thing with Agile is that is requires such personal responsibility to be successful, it doesn't work as well in the command and control environment of most corporations/enterprises.

As far as innovation, it is happening mostly in startups that are in the trenches living it.

~)ogustin

http://blog.adsdevshop.com/ Robert Dempsey

Hi Naresh,

It seems to me that Agile is still in the selling phase. More companies are talking about their applications of agile and the benefits gained, and more companies are coming online. The same thing happened in the Ruby on Rails world. At first it was tons of marketing, and now, a number of years later, Rails is a known commodity and the community is doing truly innovative work.

I was reading a post the other day about a guy who was packaging up a “standard” agile implementation for companies to adopt. While we know that a hybrid approach (scrum + xp + whatever) is a typical result once business environment and culture are taken into account, the point was that businesses need a starting point, and it's easier to sell a package rather than an amorphous service.

I do believe that there is innovation occuring in the Agile community, we just don't really hear about it as much. Here's why.

When I was at the Agile Development Practices Conference in 2008 here in Orlando I heard speakers deriding audience members for not doing “pure Agile.” What a load of crap I thought. The same thing happened in the Rails world where people would deride newbies for not knowing everything already. We got told by Chad Fowler to stop being a bunch of assholes, and we did. Adoption of Rails has since increased greatly and the community is fantastic.

I think the same thing needs to happen in Agile. People need to stop taking a purist approach and show everyone how hybrid approaches can work extremely well. Then we'll see how far the innovation has come.Thanks for having a great blog. I've been following for quite some time, and am now happy to join in .

gustin

> People need to stop taking a purist approach and show everyone how hybrid approaches can work extremely well.

Great Point.

How is an Agilist a “Purist” anyway?

By definition agile should change, bend and morph to adapt to any enterprise or environment.

As long as the core principles and values are adhered to, an agile process will need to change to some degree for the specific environment, organization and scenario.

A tough thing with Agile is that is requires such personal responsibility to be successful, it doesn't work as well in the command and control environment of most corporations/enterprises.

As far as innovation, it is happening mostly in startups that are in the trenches living it.